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Sunday Comics: Dead Island With NBA Jam on shelves and earning praise (deservedly), EA Sports is being a little more candid about NBA Elite, the canceled title and Jam’s original dancing partner.
Electronic Arts has taken the axe to hundreds of employees at locations in Burnaby, Orlando and San Francisco today, according to chatter from former EA employees, issuing layoffs the same day it confirms a buyout of social-gaming publisher Playfish.
Electronic Arts has been on a roll lately, churning out quite a selection of new and innovative titles over the past year.
What was rumour yesterday is now fact. Madden NFL, Tiger Woods and NCAA Football games developer EA Tiburon is home to the latest casualties at Electronic Arts, though numbers were not disclosed.
The 20th edition of gaming’s signature sports simulation sells us a big-tent philosophy — dueling difficulty settings that will level the playing field between lifelong players of Madden football and more casual gamers who just want in on the fun without reading a playbook the size of an encyclopedia. As a business strategy, a more inclusive Madden makes a ton of sense. But that innovation underachieves in single-player mode and, online, it’s not much use to advanced players and it seems more to drag out competitions between the equally bad ones.
That’s not to say Madden NFL 09 is a failure or a warmed-over roster update. It is by any objective measure the best version of the game since Madden ’05, which was the game’s apotheosis on 2nd-generation consoles. Madden 09′s outstanding presentation will please lifelong adherents, and its remarkably accurate replay analysis will educate newcomers and encourage those returning to the series. Foundationally, this version begins the title’s next generation. But in gameplay, it takes safe but incremental steps toward the classic, impossible goal of a sports title: Creating realistic competition that is challenging yet winnable. If you are not an experienced player, Madden ’09 skews toward winnable, but it doesn’t leave you feeling like you played your best.
1UP are reporting that David Ortiz, lead producer on the Madden series at EA’s Tiburon, has left the studio, citing family reasons. 1UP, however, are also saying sources have told them he’s quit because “he grew frustrated with the inner workings of the studio”. You mean a man can grow frustrated with working on a game that, subtle tweaks aside, hasn’t enjoyed a fundamental overhaul since Madden 2002? Can’t see how that could happen. Madden Lead Producer Leaves EA Tiburon [1UP]
So what do the employees of the development studio responsible for yearly Madden goodness do to let off steam? The same thing most office workers do, only slightly bigger. The Orlando Sentinel has a story on the proud pranking tradition at EA Tiburon, detailing such capers as disassembling and reassembling a golf cart inside of a manager’s office, filling a conference room with thousands of dollars worth of plastic balls, suitable for diving, and my personal favorite, brining in a contractor to plaster over a boss’s door with drywall so it looks like it never existed. My favourite part of the article is when artist John Taylor explains how the insurance company that shares their office park feels about the pranksters. “They hate us because we have fun and they don’t and their bosses would never put up with the kind of crap we do,” Taylor said. “They are all grownups. They are weak. We are cool. They’re not.”
Ooo, burn!
No time off from EA’s cool capers [The Orlando Sentinel via Next Generation]
